What is VPN and how does VPN protect you on internet?

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What Is A VPN? Virtual Private Network (VPN) A VPN is an internet security method used in adding extra security and privacy to your network. Public or private networks such as public WiFi (wireless), home WiFi, internet by Internet Service Providers (ISP) has a great internet security threat without a VPN. VPN is use basically to protect sensitive data. The essence of VPN is user privacy by replacing the user's initial IP address with one from VPN provider. This allows the user to hide his IP location while exposing the VPN IP to the public. VPN Security For the most part, VPN does not provides anonymity as some users perceive, but provides additional layer of security between you and your ISP or any network that you are connected to. This is achieve by encrypting all your data during communication before leaving your device. This means even if your data is intercepted, it will be meaningless to the person who intercepted it. VPN uses an encryption protocols that is advan...
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Linux Systemd Gives Root Privileges to Invalid Usernames

A bug in Linux’s systemd init system causes root permissions to be given to services associated with invalid usernames, and while this could pose a security risk, exploitation is not an easy task.

A developer who uses the online moniker “mapleray” last week discovered a problem related to systemd unit files, the configuration files used to describe resources and their behavior. Mapleray noticed that a systemd unit file containing an invalid username – one that starts with a digit (e.g. “0day”) – will initiate the targeted process with root privileges instead of regular user privileges.
Systemd is designed not to allow usernames that start with a numeric character, but Red Hat, CentOS and other Linux distributions do allow such usernames.

“It's systemd's parsing of the User= parameter that determines the naming doesn't follow a set of conventions, and decides to fall back to its default value, root,” explained developer Mattias Geniar.
While this sounds like it could be leveraged to obtain root privileges on any Linux installation using systemd, exploiting the bug in an attack is not an easy task. Geniar pointed out that the attacker needs root privileges in the first place to edit the systemd unit file and use it.

The attack scenarios described by the developer include tricking an administrator into creating a malicious unit file, or exploiting a different vulnerability to obtain write access and using unit files to escalate privileges. Others noted that an administrator can deliberately create a username that starts with a digit and wrongly assume that the program will run with user-level privileges instead of as root. Some scenarios described on Hacker News don’t even require the involvement of the system administrator.

Systemd developers have classified this issue as “not-a-bug” and they apparently don’t plan on fixing it. Linux users are divided on the matter – some believe this is a vulnerability that could pose a serious security risk, while others agree that a fix is not necessary.

“It's an obvious bug (at least on RHEL/CentOS 7), since a valid username does not get accepted by systemd so it triggers unexpected behaviour by launching services as root.

However, it isn't as bad as it sounds and does not grant any username with a digit immediate root access,” Geniar explained.

This is not the only systemd flaw disclosed recently. Chris Coulson, an engineer with Canonical, the developer of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, revealed last week that systemd is affected by an out-of-bounds write vulnerability (CVE-2017-9445) that can be triggered using a specially crafted TCP payload to crash the systemd-resolved daemon or execute arbitrary code in the context of the daemon process.

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